Time & Perspective Quote by Anna Jameson

Jameson slips a radical idea into a calm, almost devotional sentence: identity isn’t a fixed inventory of traits so much as a posture of attention. “What we truly and earnestly aspire to be” makes aspiration sound less like a wish and more like a disciplined practice, an inner alignment. The rhetoric hinges on “in some sense,” a qualifier that keeps her from naïve self-help optimism while still insisting something real happens before any external proof arrives.

The key move is psychological, not metaphysical. “Changing the frame of the mind” suggests aspiration works like a lens: tilt it, and the world (and the self) reorganizes. For “the moment,” you inhabit the moral and emotional logic of the person you’re trying to become. Jameson’s subtext is that becoming begins as a mode of perception and behavior - how you interpret temptation, responsibility, and possibility - and that shift has immediate consequences even if your résumé hasn’t caught up.

Context matters. Writing in a 19th-century culture crowded with moral improvement literature, constrained gender roles, and religiously inflected ideas of character, Jameson is carving out agency where social structures often denied it. She doesn’t claim aspiration magically cancels circumstance; she claims it creates a present-tense foothold. The line flatters the reader’s will, but it also demands sincerity: “truly and earnestly” implies that half-hearted self-fashioning won’t alter the frame. The wit is subtle: the “mere” in “mere aspiration” is a misdirection, because she’s arguing that what looks insubstantial is precisely where transformation starts.